The PowerPC 601 as the first-generation processor supporting the 32-bit PowerPC RISC instruction set in the early 90's is being retired with the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel.

The PowerPC 601 was designed in the early 90's as the first processor supporting 32-bit PowerPC. The PowerPC 601 was a legendary processor for its time in the PowerPC world for introducing SMP capabilities and other new features of the era while being designed for the IBM RS

Some HP Spectre laptops and possibly other HP models as well should be performing better when running on AC power starting with the Linux 5.10 kernel.

With at least some HP Spectre laptops, the firmware has been setting the thermal policy to the default but hard-coding an Intel DPTF (Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework) variable that was leading to thermald choosing the wrong DPTF profile and in turn leading to lower performance on AC power where as normally the highest performance is achievable when running on AC power rather than battery

Today perhaps will be the most interesting day since the start of the pandemic... It's finally the day where AMD Zen 3 desktop CPUs are expected to be revealed in just about one hour's time! Stay tuned, but before that virtual event, here is a word on the Linux prospects and support for these upcoming AMD CPUs.

Long story short, barring any issues like we've seen in the past around flakey RdRand or other problems, the AMD Zen 3 desktop CPU support under Linux should

Following last month's release of GNOME 3.38 , out today is GNOME 3.38.1 as the first point release to this H2'2020 Linux desktop environment.

GNOME 3.38.1 brings with it many fixes for early fallout from this six-month desktop update. There is also the usual assortment of translation updates. Among the fixes highlighting GNOME 3.38.1 are:

- Many fixes for the Epiphany web browser including the launching of system

With this quarter's Mesa 20.3 the Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker providing OpenCL support finally can handle version 1.2!

Clover has been at OpenCL 1.1 support for years but with not much activity until Red Hat's relatively recent work on Nouveau compute as well as Microsoft's interest in using Mesa for mapping OpenCL and OpenGL over Direct3D for WSL2 and other use-cases. Thanks to the renewed interest in Clover, OpenCL 1.2 support is finally

Tencent developers have proposed "DMEMFS" as a virtual file-system with the intent of helping to save system memory on large servers such as in public cloud environments.

DMEMFS is the Direct Memory File-System and allows for reserving portions of the system RAM and it will not be managed by the kernel. The aim is to remove the struct page normally associated with each physical memory page. For desktop users and even most server users this doesn't equate to much in the way of memory savings, but for hyperscalers

It looks like for Linux 5.11 there could be lower power usage during video playback on DCN 2.1 hardware, namely AMD Renoir .

Sent out on Wednesday were the latest set of AMD DC patches for their "display core" code shared between Windows and Linux. Of the patches , catching our eye was a DCN 2.1 power optimization for video playback.

That change amounts to enabling ODM Combine and fullscreen MPO on DCN2.1 hardware, which is most notably Renoir. The full-screen

Launched at the start of the year was the Kubuntu Focus as a polished KDE laptop while now it's been succeeded by a second-generation model.

The second-generation Kubuntu Focus laptop is known as the Kubuntu Focus "M2" and features an updated processor, Kubuntu 20.04 LTS by default rather than 18.04, and other new hardware upgrade options.